Nuggets for Nuggets | Death and Dying

Hello Citizens and Civilians, and welcome to our new blog version of Nuggets for Nuggets! As well as giving you new, exciting, bite-sized tidbits of information during the show, we thought we’d post them all here for your viewing pleasure!

Death and Dying

Long story short: There will be permadeath. It will be permanent, just not immediate. Each character will be able “die” multiple times before the character is finally put to rest. Think of this like “lives” in an old school arcade game. Or like the Original Legend of Zelda, but with a limited number of “continues.” A dynamically calculated number of times, getting “killed” in the ‘verse, will result in you being only “mostly… dead.” And, aside from having your pockets emptied of loose change, there won’t be serious in-game consequences.

Depending on where you were hit and how you died, you may need replacement parts like Captain Picard’s artificial heart or an artificial arm like that shouty lieutenant in Starship Troopers. There will even be opportunities to wind back that dynamically calculated number – some 1UP mushrooms, if you will – scattered around at shady genetic clinics and super advanceds cybernetic labs.

OK so, what counts as a death? Sitting in a ship while it explodes around you? Yes. A safe ejection? No. Getting your ejection seat blasted out of the sky? Yes. To quote the “Death of a Spaceman” article on RSI: “Your badly charred and almost dead avatar is recovered and you wake up in a med bay.” Shot in the head during a boarding action? Probably. Depends if you’re the boarder or the boardee.

Die enough times and, instead of the hospital, you’ll continue the game at your own funeral, in the body of the “beneficiary” you specify when setting up your initial player character. But if your dead guy did something cool, you’ll get a neat obituary and a nice headstone. Seeing as this is going to apply to major NPCs as well, one of those cool things you might do is permanent remove a major bad guy – or good guy, I suppose – from the ‘verse. “Here lies the toasty, crispy mortal remains of Lee Harvey John Wilkes Wilkes-Booth, assassin of UEE High Advocate Bob the Punctual.”

Your beneficiary gets all your stuff – ships, gear, cash, and even most of your reputation. That’s right, your “new” player character starts out all haunted by your past and whatnot. And, just like players, major NPCs will also be replaced – like His Wordiness, High Advocate Steve the Loquacious.

Your wingman can also pull you out of the soup – just make sure your buddy has a tractor beam installed! Knowing who I’ll be flying with, I think I have the gear for the lower turret mount on my Connie picked out. I – uh, he or she can grab your worthless butt out of the deep black and put you to work on his ship – for whatever good you’ll do him. If your incompetence is truly remarkable or your bad luck horribly contagious, your friend’s multi-person crew ship will be able to eject you all into space for eventual recovery.

OK, so this is a game, right? And mechanics-wise this is all well and good, but what about, umm, let’s politely call it “meta-gaming” or gaming the game. OK FINE griefing and QQing.

If you’re gonna camp out above Earth and Terra splashing noobs in their brand new Aurora LXs, you’re in for a world of hurt – like making it legal for players to smoke your Drake Cutlass AND blow your ejected pod out of ANY space zone, NPC and Player bounties put on your head, and revocation of your landing privileges on anything but outlaw systems. Also, it wouldn’t surprise me to see the spreadsheet controlling your dynamic “extra lives” get a little personal attention from the dev team if you make yourself a true pain in the community’s aft.

On the flip side, if you find yourself taunting someone and getting more than you asked for, some might be tempted to have a “router issue” in the middle of the fight. OK, that’s probably going to count as a “safe ejection,” even if you have an ACTUAL router issue. So, if your insinuations about your opponent’s parental heritage or implications of his cross-species romantic liasons REALLY hit home, you may want to pull your ethernet cable if you’re pretty sure he’s going to smoke your pod – did I just make a new euphemism there?

So, what’s in a name? Well a ‘nugget’, as well as being a small, bite-sized piece of information is also the name for a trainee pilot. Nuggets for Nuggets is a weekly section of the show where we delve into the mechanics of Star Citizen and give you the gory details from the inside out. As the game is still in active development, all the information given is subject to change but we will revisit sections in the future to bring you up to speed.